Nobody on strike can afford to lose a day's pay - but sometimes there's no choice

Mirror Online columnist Ross Wynne-Jones joins a protest in Barnsley, a town which has never recovered from the pit closures

The strike protest in Barnsley yesterday might not have been the biggest in the country, but it was among the most determined.

Council offices were shut as a march wound through streets where the air once tasted of coal dust. All the local libraries bar one were closed. No bins were emptied. Thousands of children were off school.

Teachers, firefighters, council workers, mums and dads with pushchairs and OAPs marched shoulder to shoulder under banners calling for fair pay and an end to cuts.

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Workers march through Newcastle

“At our workplace, my union wasn’t balloted for a strike, but I’ve never crossed a picket line in my life and I’m not starting today,” one housing worker said. He had taken the day off at the loss of a day’s pay.

Public sector wages have fallen by 18 per cent in real terms since the Coalition was elected. That’s felt doubly hard in Barnsley, which has never recovered from the pit closures.

A 60-year-old social worker said she was marching for three generations. “For me, because they put my retirement age up, for my children, who are teaching assistants, and my grandchildren’s future.

“I’m ashamed that in my job I’m handing out food vouchers to people who aren’t scroungers.”

On the march: Public sector workers on strike in Brighton

She had worked for 42 years and said she wanted to retire and let an unemployed young person do her job.

“The Tories’ll tell you there’s a lady of 78 who still loves working in Asda,” she says. “But they won’t tell you she does it because she’s too lonely to stay at home.”

Carol Green, 64, had brought her nine-year-old grandson Kyle along. “We’re marching for the teachers, for the local pensioners, firefighters, people who collect the bins,” she said. “They need a wage they can live on.”

Across the country many people were marching against cuts handed down from central government.

No one on strike in Barnsley yesterday could afford to lose a day’s pay. But Barnsley knows, as well as anywhere, that sometimes there is no choice.